The $24,000 Snap

Bob Vetrone Jr.

Posted:
Wednesday, December 5, 2012, 1:41 AM

If you're having trouble spending all of your Christmas bonus and find yourself with an extra $24,000 or so laying around, here's an idea: Pay Michael Vick to come over to your house ... bend over in front of him ... hike him a football ... and then write him a check. You do that, and all you've really done is imitate Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie.

Assuming he is indeed finished playing for the Eagles, CSNPhilly.com's Reuben Frank tells us that Vick will end up being paid $35,500,000 of the $100 million contract he signed in August 2011. Considering that he took 1,474 snaps since then, that comes to $24,084 a snap. That may be tipping money to people named Vick, Cataldi and Barkann, but it sounds more like college tuition to us.

It is also three times as much as Vick made per snap in his first two seasons with the Eagles ($7,930 for each of 867 plays, including playoffs).

Below are how Vick's numbers for his first two years in South Philly compare with his last two. We particularly like his total TDs to turnover difference (plus-24 in 2009-10; minus-1 in 2011-12) and his passing TD percentage (which dropped off by two whole percentage points since signing the megacontract).

And below that are what Vick was seemingly paid over both those periods for some of the things he did on the football field. (How does $3.5 million per win over the last two seasons grab you? Or the nearly $500,000 earned for the 77-yard passing TD to DeSean Jackson, at $6,492 a yard, earlier this season?)

You read on while we go break open my daughters' piggy banks ... Those property taxes aren't going to pay themselves.

Boop – who goes by Bob Vetrone Jr. when he is undercover or paying bills – has been at the Daily News since 1982, after working for five years at the Philadelphia Bulletin up to its closing. Along with helping to build the sports scoreboards most nights, he has had great input into the papers’ special sports pullouts – March Madness, Broad Street Run, Record Breakers, Greatest Moments – as well as its day-to-day, award-winning event coverage.

A 1980 graduate of North Catholic, he took some evening college courses. Those lasted right up until the first conflict with a Big 5 doubleheader.

His favorite books growing up were the NBA Guide and the Baseball Encyclopedia, which was, for all intents and purposes, the Internet before there was an Internet.

He has been immersed in sports statistics since the early 70s, when his father (long-time sports writer, broadcaster and the Daily News’ Buck The Bartender), would take him into the Bulletin newsroom overnight in the summer and let him update the Phillies statistics in a little, black spiral notebook. But things have changed tremendously in the decades since … He now uses a big, black spiral notebook.